Hannah Jane > Recent Status Updates

E.B. White: "I'm glad your fall from the roof did no serious damage. A man who puts a porch on a henhouse is, I'm afraid, asking for it."

Edmund Ware Smith's response: "You are due a measure of cool reproof for your slurring thrust at one who puts a porch on his henhouse. I put that porch on to give my henhouse distinction. Do you know of any other henhouse which admiring neighbors call, 'The Chicken Hilton.'"

A book of letters has never made me laugh so much! All the talk about henhouses is such a delight to read:

In one of Edmund Ware Smith's letters: "I am the only man anywhere in these parts with E.B. White as a henhouse consultant."

Emmy (Emily) Maxwell writing to Eudora about the fruitcake Eudora sent: "...And it was good to have something from your hands. I only like the parts of Christmas that people make."

"You can't control grief by subtracting joy from your life. You can't control grief, period."

The you that exists in the present - right now - wants to pursue your deeper goals, and wants to be a better person. But you know you're fallible and likely to crack in the face of temptation. So you bind the future version of you. You narrow your choices. You tie yourself to the mast.

Every time I think I'm going to abandon this book it gives me something interesting:

"Writing to Rockwell on December 31, Disney thanked him for 'the swell portraits of my kids...You captured a mood in my older daughter that I think is wonderful because at times she is such a serious thing and has often given me that same look that brings me off my high horse.'"

“The poem in which the reader does not feel himself or herself a participant is a lecture, listened to from an uncomfortable chair, in a stuffy room, inside a building.”

“Reid [her husband] could always tell when I had a new skull that was giving me trouble. We might be sitting on the couch talking when he noticed my gaze veering off and say, ‘You’re looking at my skull again, aren’t you?’”

“I long ago decided that if the things I make ever cease to emerge in my mind‘s eye, I would stop making them. It never occurred to me that they might simply continue to rise up as long as I live, bid into a body no longer able to rise to meet them.”

“What we enjoy as children wields an indelible hold, but perhaps what we missed has an equally determined grip.”

“I said, ‘write a poem about the quietest things or the quietest times you can think of; if you like, put a different quiet thing in every line.’”

“ Each individual lives the story of his or her own existence - we “translate” our lives as we live them. In my case translated into objects: art and books.”

Time to visit this again ❤️

“Whatever pain you can’t get rid of, make it your creative offering…”

Not sure how I'm feeling about this, but one of the characters, Dorothy just told someone to "unass" their seat. 😂

Poet David Wright writing about how his deafness is rarely without sound:

Such nonsounds include the flight and movement of birds, even fish, swimming in clear water…I take it that the flight of most birds, at least, at a distance, must be silent…Yet it appears audible, each species creating a different ‘eye-music’ of the nonchalant melody…”

“Pattern pleases us, rewards a mind seduced, and yet exhausted by complexity.”

“Look patiently, affectionately, at anything, gather, six or eight perceptions, and it will never look the same again.”

“Awareness is immanent, and infinitely available, but it is camouflaged like a shy animal.”

Know your sources of rejuvenation:

the amount of solitude you need to feel fresh again

the activities that strengthen your creativity

the people who light up your spirit

In reference to naked mole-rats: “It appears a combination of bullying and crap meals is a highly effective way of ruling an underground organization.“

This is horrifying.

Could that be me?

An alarm clock
With no hands
Ticking loudly
On the town dump.

“…the Papago liken saguaros…to Homo sapiens because no matter how much they tend to dominate a landscape, they are still vulnerable.”

“Perhaps we love the things that reflect our own delusions about ourselves back to us. I love stones because they are old and hard and sure, which is how I feel, even though I am not.”

“‘Poetry doesn’t solve my problems,’ Hugo said…
’Why would anyone have problems poetry couldn’t solve?’ Jack demanded.”

“I forgive you…For being unable/to forgive yourself first, so you/could then forgive others and/at last find a way to become/the love that you want in this world.”

Reading this at the same time I’m reading The Guncle is priceless.

In reference to her pebble plant:

“My daily amazement had to do not only with its ingenious masquerade but also with the alternative it offered to the festival of exposure that seems so central to the way we live today. This little plant offered an opposite approach. It was expert at receding, with disappearance woven into its cellular structure.”

“Listening is the willingness to have your mind changed.”

I have been asking myself if I have this willingness…and I’m sometimes surprised by the absolute train wreck of my thoughts when I sometimes answer no.